Darlin'
by MisguidedGhostTwilighter
Summary: Leah wondered, was okay for her to cry? To cry and not scrub the offending tears away before they could even fall?   ONESHOT


_Darlin'_

_Summary:_

Sue sighed, letting the old tears that she'd cried a thousand times slide down her cheeks. Leah was staring at her with wide eyes. She'd never seen her mother cry, not ever. Did that mean it was okay for her to cry? To cry and not scrub the offending tears away before they could even fall?

ONESHOT

When Leah was little, she used to hide in the closet under the stairs where the coats were kept She always went there when she was scared or upset, and so it was only natural for her to run there now. She'd seen them together: her bitch of a cousin and her cheating bastard of a fiancée. They'd been on the beach, holding hands; it would've been the sweetest moment, if _he_ hadn't been engaged to Leah and if _she_ hadn't been Leah's best friend. Her best fucking friend. So much for trust; so much for all the secrets they'd whispered to each other when they were seven years old.

Inside the closet, it smelt as it always had done: of her dad's aftershave, her mom's perfume and sea salt. That was a smell that her mom had never been able to clean out of their clothes, not that she'd tried that hard. Her mom wasn't exactly the domestic type.

That was why the floor of the closet was covered in screwed up shopping receipts, Seth's old toys, and numerous other things. Leah climbed up onto the worn out stool that sat at the back of the closet. She immediately drew her knees up to her chin, inhaling the familiar, comforting smell of the coats that were clustered around her.

It was a good smell; a smell of childhood nights trying to avoid going to bed early; a smell of hide and seek with the Black twins. It was a smell that allowed her to cry. And cry she did; she cried for three hours straight, hidden away in the closet, where no one could see or hear her.

But someone knew. Her mother, Sue, knew. She'd heard the door slam back against the wall as soon as her daughter had come running in, and she'd known what had happened. They'd been expecting it for a few weeks now, and Sue had been dreading it.

She decided to let her stay in the closet for as long as she wanted. With Leah, there was no point interrupting her; no point questioning her until she was ready. Sue had learnt that after years of getting chased out of Leah's room with a pillow, or something harder and sharper, heading for her head.

So, even though Sue wasn't normally one to hold back that was exactly what she did. She waited for two whole days, until Leah started to spend more than five minutes outside of the closet. Leah was in the kitchen, shredding photographs, when Sue judged the time to be right.

"Leah," she said, sitting down opposite her at the kitchen table.

Her daughter didn't respond for a few minutes; her face was screwed up in an expression of bitter resentment as she forced a photograph of herself and Sam through the shredder. It whirred and clunked, destroying the image forever.

"Leah, I'm so sorry, darlin'," Sue tried again.

Leah's head snapped around to glare at her mother, her heartbroken hazel eyes burning.

"I don't want you to feel sorry for me. I don't need you to feel sorry for me!"

Sue had expected this; of course Leah would say that. She had always been the type of person to hide her feelings, just like Sue. But, now, Sue knew it her forty-year-old mind that this wasn't the right time to hide feelings. This was the time to let them out. So Sue did.

"Leah, I've been through this same thing. What's happened to you, it happened to me, too."

Leah blinked twice quickly but didn't say a word. She wouldn't let her mother trick her like this, she told herself. This was bullshit; no one could possibly understand, no one could possibly understand...

"When I was thirteen I met Jamie," Sue continued, her eyes on her daughter but her thoughts far away, as she sunk back into her memories of her long gone teenage years in the rain of La Push.

"It was summer, but, obviously, it was raining. I went down to the beach with a few of my friends, because we used to love surfing in the rain. And he was there, already surfing, on his own. Of course, we were annoyed. This kid was a tourist and he was in our territory, doing our thing better than we did, though we wouldn't admit that last part."

Leah almost smiled. She was the same; for years she'd refused to admit that Seth could play basketball better than her.

"My friends sent me over to talk to this newbie," Sue went on. "Because I was the best at deciding who should stay and who should go, and I wasn't afraid to tell them to get lost. So, I waited for this guy to come back to shore, and then I confronted him. I asked him who he was, and what he was doing and he answered every question with this really amused look on his face."

Sue sighed as she remembered him: his barely tanned skin, his scruffy brown hair, his relaxed grin that had pissed her off so thoroughly when she first met him.

"So, he annoyed the hell out of me. He was there at the beach everyday, and, for a week, we ignored him. Then, slowly, he ended up in our group. I hated him, but he grew on me. And, we fell in love. We were together for years; he promised to marry me one day, and we were saving up to buy a ring. Then his dad got a better job somewhere out of state and they moved away. He swore that with the extra money his dad got, he'd buy me a ring and we'd get married as soon as we turned sixteen, which was about a year away. But then he just... didn't. He didn't call, he didn't write... and then I found out that my best friend's ex-girlfriend's younger sister's best friend's cousin, who lived in the state that he'd moved to, had seen him with another girl."

Sue sighed, letting the old tears that she'd cried a thousand times slide down her cheeks. Leah was staring at her with wide eyes. She'd never seen her mother cry, not ever. Did that mean it was okay for her to cry? To cry and not scrub the offending tears away before they could even fall?

"I've been practicing baking," Leah murmured, her eyes down on the table. "I wanted to make the perfect cake for the wedding."

Sue reached across and wrapped her fingers around Leah's hand. A single tear fell from Leah's eyes, down onto the scratched wooden surface of the table.

"We were going to spend our whole honeymoon in that tiny log cabin on the cliffs by the beach," Leah continued, her voice thick and her eyes burning. "We were going to rent it off the guy who owns it, y'know, the guy who lives in the blue house in Forks. We were going to sleep on the floor, 'cause the place has got no furniture. We were going to have a sleeping bag..."

Leah started sobbing, her shoulder shaking and her breath coming in short, strangled, heartbroken gasps.

"Oh, mom, what am I gonna do?" she moaned, looking up at Sue with pleading, tear-filled eyes. Sue walked around the table, sat down next to Leah, and pulled the sobbing eighteen year old onto her lap. Leah buried her face in her mother's hair and she cried. She cried harder than she'd cried alone in the closet, because, as everyone knows, being hugged makes you cry harder. The comfort makes you shrink back into being a child. And so a child Leah was, as she cried into her mom's shoulder.

That was the last time she cried, and the last time she and her mother shared feelings. Because Leah grew up very quickly after that and hardened into someone bitter. She became so bitter, in fact, that nothing could make her cry ever, ever again. It was a promise she made to herself, and a promise she kept.

_A/N:_

So, yeah, hi. I hope that was good; please review. Oh, and read my other fanfics, please. And review. Please review. I like reviews; they're like cookies, except even better. So, yeah, please review. Here, have a bribe: a virtual cookie (::) Now will you review? Please? Yeah, I'll shut up now.


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